Research Paper On Roberto Clemente

Ashley Dansby

Eagle ID: 900835596

Roberto Clemente Rough Draft Roberto Clemente once said “I want to be remembered as a baseball player who gave all I had to give.” One could easily say that Roberto Clemente left everything he had on the baseball field, when he played. Roberto Clemente was originally born in a fairly large city in Puerto Rico. Clemente came from humble beginnings. His father was a foreman at a sugar cane plantation, while his mother did little odd jobs such as running the grocery store on the same sugar cane plantation. Clemente even worked on the plantation to help bring in money for his family of nine and to also buy a bicycle. While growing up, Clemente was focused on baseball and track. He even won medals for javelin throwing.

He was the first Hispanic baseball player to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and the first to reach three thousand hits. His induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame was specifically special because an exception was made for him to be inducted into the Hall of Fame after his unexpected death. Usually baseball players cannot be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame for at least five years after they quit playing, but Clemente was inducted in 1973. With all that being said, Clemente also never forgot where he came

He even said that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of his heroes. From the beginning, Clemente believed that race did not play any roles in determining who a person was and how they handled themselves. When he entered the United States, he was introduced to racism especially when he went to spring training in Florida where racism was very much a live and noticeable. He had not experienced racism in his home country like he did in the United States. In Pittsburgh, people either saw you as black or white, not Latino. Since Clemente was a dark skinned Latino, people saw him as black because his skin was dark. Most of the time, when he went places with his team, he could not eat in the same restaurants as his white teammates or even stay in the same hotels as his teammates. He was forced to eat and sleep on the bus most of the time. It reached a point where Clemente was so fed up with the injustices that colored players were facing especially at Spring Training that he finally coerced the Pittsburgh Pirates front office management to allow the black players to travel in their own buses. Clemente made the statement that enduring the racial divide in Florida was like being in prison. For this, Clemente spoke out against the Jim Crow laws, oppression and even marched in some street protests. At one point, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. even went down to Puerto Rico